Shooting Gallery (2 page)

Anthony Brazil gave me a withering glance. The vertically challenged proprietor of San Francisco's premier art gallery was an old friend of my father's, but he and I were not on the best of terms. Anthony had invited me to the grand opening of his swanky new gallery only in grudging recognition of my having held my tongue about his role in an art forgery scandal last spring, while I was attending the event only in the hope of landing a wealthy client or ten for my faux-finishing business. As my grandfather had taught me, a little blackmail, judiciously applied, just made good business sense.

My spotting a corpse in Brazil's oak tree was more than either of us had bargained for.

“Don't look at me like that,” I said, downing the last swallow of a rich Russian River Pinot Noir, smoothing my unruly dark curls and brushing imaginary crumbs from my one and only little black dress. “
I
didn't put a body in your tree.”

“My dear child, such a thought never crossed my mind,” Brazil hissed in his high tenor. Although outwardly calm, his signature red bow tie trembled. “But you
do
seem to attract the more, shall we say,
unseemly
element of the art world, do you not?”

“You give me entirely too much credit, Anthony,” I sniffed.

It was true that I had become embroiled in a scandal involving forged sketches and the theft of a priceless Caravaggio masterpiece last spring. It was also true that I had spent my seventeenth birthday in a Parisian jail cell accused—quite rightly, I must confess—of flooding the European art market with forgeries of Old Master drawings. But those charges had been dropped when no French art expert had been willing to testify that
une jeune fille américaine
was capable of such high-quality work.

After graduating from college, I reveled in an art restoration internship at San Francisco's Brock Museum until a spiteful ‘expert' spilled the beans about my prior close working relationship with my grandfather Georges LeFleur, who happened to be one of the world's foremost art forgers. Banished from the fine-art world, I had spent the last several years slowly building up a legitimate faux-finishing business, True/Faux Studios. I worked long hours painting decorative finishes in homes and businesses, paid exorbitant self-employment taxes, and belonged to the Better Business Bureau. It wasn't as exciting as being a Parisian artist, but neither was it as scary as being a Parisian prisoner.

Still, although these days my life was lived on the up-and-up—mostly, anyway—a residual distrust of the police lingered. The sound of approaching sirens put my nerves on edge and seemed to rev up the crowd as well. I watched the distinguished guest director of the San Francisco Opera throw an elbow into the gut of a local radio-talk-show host as they jockeyed for position at the packed garden exit. Newly elected Mayor Joseph Green showed considerably more class by stopping to help Gloria Cabrera to her feet. Gloria was the manager of Marble World, a major stone importer in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I had seen her stare down not one but three angry contractors, their clients, and their work crews. If Gloria was vulnerable to this pack of tuxedoed hyenas I figured I didn't stand a chance and decided to try my luck exiting through the gallery.

“Don't even
think
about leaving before speaking to the police,” Anthony snapped, as if reading my mind.

“What
must
you think of me?” I said, feigning shock.

Ol' Tony gave me the fish eye, and I reluctantly trailed him inside, where about a dozen less-panicky guests grazed on hors d'oeuvres and chattered excitedly about the gruesome discovery. As Brazil started working the room, reassuring anyone who would listen that this was all a dreadful misunderstanding, I grabbed a tumbler of single-malt scotch from the bar. Taking a fortifying gulp, I glanced out at the garden through the plate-glass window at the rear of the gallery. The limp body was clearly visible, thanks to the exhibit lighting. Covered in layers of fine beige dust, the corpse had a monochromatic, stonelike appearance, the face partially obscured by a drape of lank, powdery hair, and one hand wrapped mummylike in a dirty cloth.

Forcing my eyes from the ghoulish sight, I spied a Biedermier side table stacked with glossy show catalogues. Entitled “The New Anthony Brazil Gallery Presents ‘Tortured Bodies, Tortured Souls: 30 Years of the Sculptural Work of Seamus McGraw,'” the introductory essay explained in impenetrable postmodern prose that McGraw's metal and leather sculptures depicting murder, torture, and mutilation offered a uniquely scathing commentary on the alienation inherent in contemporary America's death-dealing society.

Or a uniquely repulsive insight into the mind of a self-indulgent artist,
I thought as I flipped through the catalogue. I paused at the black-and-white photographs of the show's largest installation,
The Postman Should Never Ring Twice
, which depicted bound and twisted figures in their death agonies, cowering at the feet of a demented letter carrier armed with hemp rope, steel thumbscrews, and something that looked suspiciously like a bronze dildo. I studied the grotesque images dispassionately. McGraw's ugly sculptures struck me as less alienated than sad—and lonely. Call me a boring traditionalist, but when it came to art my tastes were stuck in the Renaissance, an era when artists expressed humanity's noblest hopes, ambitions, and dreams. If I wanted a scathing commentary on social alienation I could read the newspaper.

I was about to toss the catalogue aside when the color photograph on the back cover, autographed in a loopy, flamboyant hand, caught my eye. Seamus McGraw posed in his studio, barefoot and dressed in baggy khaki drawstring pants and a white cotton shirt, smiling warmly at the camera. He was handsome in an aging hippy kind of way, the sharp planes of his tanned face softened by middle age, and I felt a frisson of recognition. Looking out the rear window again, I realized the corpse in the tree bore a striking resemblance to the one person who had been conspicuously absent from tonight's opening: the guest of honor, sculptor Seamus McGraw.

I had heard of artists denouncing the philanthropic hands that fed them. I had heard of artists staging days-long performance art wherein nothing ever seemed to happen. But I had never heard of an artist building a show around his own death.
Give the man points for originality
, I thought. Perhaps McGraw had decided to become a grisly contribution to his sculptural menagerie in an attempt to achieve the ultimate synergy with his work. It seemed a little extreme to me, but extremism in modern art was not uncommon.

Turning away from the morbid view, I nearly collided with a fortyish brunette wearing a chic black dress that was in imminent danger of falling off her undernourished shoulders.

“Are stuffed mushrooms low-carb?” the woman demanded, waving the hors d'oeuvres in question under my nose.

“You bet,” I replied, though I had no idea. She looked as though she could use the calories. Her large, horsy teeth bit into a greasy, sausage-stuffed mushroom cap and chewed vigorously. My stomach lurched. “I'm Annie Kincaid.”

“Janice, Janice Hewett,” she mumbled around a mouthful of mushroom. “My husband, Norman, and I buy from Anthony Brazil all the time. We've never seen
anything
like this before. Can you
imagine
? What a
gloriously
devastating way to kill oneself! Not that it's not
tragic
.” Janice nabbed a hot crab puff from a tray offered by a slightly green-faced waiter and shoved it, whole, into her mouth. A bit of the creamy filling escaped, oozing over her bottom lip. “What
is
it with sculptors these days?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, mesmerized by the sight of the creamy white glob slowly sliding down her pointy chin.

“They're just
too
much trouble.” She wiped her face with a cocktail napkin and I relaxed. “Give me a nice painter any day. You can usually deal with them, unless they eat their paints. You know, like van Gogh?”

“Van Gogh was pretty unstable already,” I objected.
Poor Vincent
, I thought. A good dose of Prozac might have eased his suffering but could also have dulled his artistic vision, depriving the world of his astonishing genius. It made me wonder whether Seamus McGraw had been similarly tortured by creative demons.

“Anyway,” Janice said, lunging for the last bacon-wrapped water chestnut. A portly man across the steam table glared at her before slurping up a raw oyster with a loud smack of his rubbery lips. A wave of nausea rolled over me, and I tried to concentrate on what Janice Hewett was saying. “We've recently had a run-in with a sculptor, another in dear Anthony's stable of artists. Brilliant but quite
mad
, you have
no
idea. He's a contemporary of McGraw's, but not as well known these days. Robert Pascal. Have you heard of him?”

“Why yes, he's an old acquaintance of my father's,” I said, surprised. I hadn't seen Robert Pascal since I was ten years old. I remembered begging him for one of his horrid little maquettes—small-scale models of sculptures that artists make to work out problems of scale and composition before taking a chisel to a block of stone or putting flame to metal—because it was perfect for my dollhouse installation,
Tattooed Barbie and Biker Ken
. My father had taken one look at that dollhouse and sent me into therapy.

My opinion of Pascal's work had not improved over the years. He was very much in Seamus McGraw's
Life Is a Suppurating Cesspool
school of art, which was not surprising since the two had studied together in Berkeley in the 1960s. To my eyes, though, Pascal's sculptures were colder than McGraw's, more disaffected than gruesome. Still, I remembered Pascal as a nice old man and had wondered if he would be here tonight.

“You know Robert Pascal?
Personally
? What luck!” Janice gushed, hitching up her dress. I braced myself. In my experience, people who gushed inevitably caused trouble. “Pascal
stole
our sculpture!”

“What sculpture?”

“
Head and Torso
,” she replied, trying and failing to sound modest.
Head and Torso
was Robert Pascal's most famous piece, and by far his most haunting. Completed when he was a young man, it had generated considerable buzz and established him as a major new talent. Sadly, Pascal had never lived up to that early promise, a fact the more uncharitable art critics regularly pointed out with glee.

“Why would an artist steal his own sculpture?” I asked, but her reply was interrupted by the shrill blare of an alarm. My heart sank when I realized the sound was emanating from the Brock Museum next door. I had noticed the museum's elderly, autocratic director, Agnes Brock, chatting with Mayor Green earlier this evening, but she and I had assiduously avoided each other in a manner befitting old adversaries.

“Suicide here! Art theft there!” Janice burbled dramatically, her watery blue eyes gleaming with excitement. “And my
own
kidnapped sculpture! What could
possibly
happen
next
?”

I eyed her with distaste. I had been around plenty of art theft in my time, and more death than I cared to think about, and had found nothing thrilling about any of it. Janice placed a limp hand on my shoulder, leaned toward me, and whispered like the vapid sorority girl she must once have been, “Andy, will you do it?”

“Do what? And the name's Annie.”

“Oh. Sorry. Anyway, will you talk to Pascal for us? We need
Head and Torso
returned before the Thanksgiving symphony fundraiser next week! He was only supposed to repair some minor damage; I don't know
what
is taking him so long. It has left
such
a hole in our collection, you have
no
idea!”

“Why don't you talk to him yourself?” I said, my attention drawn to the commotion unfolding outside in the sculpture garden. Uniformed officers swarmed into the flower-filled yard and started cordoning off the oak tree with yellow police tape. A sour-faced man in a rumpled brown suit was speaking with Anthony Brazil, who kept pointing toward the gallery.
Uh-oh,
I thought.
I really should get out of here.

“Pascal won't answer his phone. Have you ever
heard
of such a thing? My Norman got so angry that he sent our man over to the studio, but Pascal wouldn't come to the door, either! There's nothing for it now but to initiate legal proceedings,” she concluded with a theatrical sigh, leaning against the silk-draped bar and languidly spearing a boiled shrimp and watercress canapé.

“You mean a lawsuit? Against a little old sculptor?” I finally gave Janice my full attention. “Surely that's premature. Maybe he wasn't home when your, uh, ‘man' called. Maybe he was working and didn't want to be disturbed. Maybe he'd fallen and couldn't get up.”

“So you'll help us, then?” A broad smile displayed her huge teeth, decorated with bits of greenery. “That is
such
a relief, you have
no
idea.”

“Really, Janice, I don't . . .”

“I'll pay you for your time, of course,” she said, shrewdly targeting my Achilles' heel.

“I charge one hundred fifty an hour,” I blurted, doubling my usual rate because Janice and Norman Hewett could obviously afford it.

Plus, I didn't like her.

“Done,” she said.

Rats. I should have gone for triple.

Janice reached into a spangly evening bag and handed me an engraved card with her phone number on it.

“I'm willing to talk to Pascal, but I can't promise he'll return
Head and Torso
. . .” I said, the rest of my sentence trailing off as I spotted a young cop pushing his way towards me through the milling crowd.